Admin

Into the fire

By
Real Estate Agent with Independent Realty

 Hello everyone: How's your week going, here is a peek into mine last week.

I was days from closing with a client I liked to call the yo-yo, just as she started to have buyer's remorse yet again, and D.C. froze all the funds to its first-time homebuyer program, a program my 20-something schoolteacher was dependent on to move into her first home. It was then I started to worry, as I watched $15,000 in commissions go kaput, or at least get placed on hold. It was that kind of week.

 And, I left journalism for this?

In my first year, as I straddled the line between journalism and selling real estate part-time, I rationalized that just as I had become a journalist to make an impact on society - to, eh, change the world, real estate was giving me that same opportunity. I would relate the tale of my first clients, a immigrant family of seven living in a two-bedroom apartment who had moved into their first home, a three-level townhouse, with room for the husband, wife, four children and the mother-in-law, too. I can, eh, change the world, this way, too, I rationalized.

But last week, just two and half years after I dove into a weakening real estate market and just a year or so after I had bid journalism adieu for good, I was starting to question those choices.

Yea, yea, the housing market was softening when I became a realtor, but what I could not foresee was that tanking real estate market would eventually take the economy down with it. I had abandoned one crumbling industry for another, it seems. The difference is that, while the housing market will recovery, journalism's, particularly newspaper journalism's, ability to bounce back remains less certain.